Commercial Trolling - Day 3

The best parts of fishing, and many other endeavors, are the unexpected moments: the rainbow off in the distance, the occasional humpback whale cruising by, the calming of the ocean after a crappy bouncy day.

King salmon are voracious eaters.  This photo shows a herring that I took out of a salmon stomach.  Next to it is a "hoochie," which salmon like to bite on.  The hook is just visible to the bottom left of the hoochie.  I'm not sure how much correlation there is to a herring and a hoochie, but the hoochies work!  By the way, forget this photo or I'll have to come after you.  Fishermen don't like to give information away like gear that works or locations that have fish!  Then you'll catch more than us!

Herring and needlefish are two of a king or coho salmon's favorite foods.  In this posed picture, the herring is on top and the needlefish are below.

Out of the 5 different types of salmon, kings and cohos eat other fish and will bite a hook.  Humpies, or pink salmon, will also - but they're not worth much at the fish dock so trollers "shake: them - which means unhook them back to the ocean.  Chum, or dog salmon - along with sockeye, rarely bite on hooks because their main food is zooplankton.  That's why they are targeted using nets.

Commercial Salmon Trolling - Day 2

Without giving you too much boring detail on how the fish gear works, fishing leaders are snapped onto the troll wire (the part that hangs down straight into the water) about 5 fathoms apart from each other.  The depth of the wire depends on the depth of the water and trollers develop "drags" that are at certain depths.   In general, we fished with about 30 fathoms of wire spooled out.  We snapped leaders on the wire every 5 fathoms (a fathom is 6 feet just in case you didn't want to google it) for about 6 leaders per wire and 24 leaders in all (4 lines, two on each side).

When you "run the gear," a person turns the handle on the hydraulics and a wire comes up.  As the leaders show, the person unsnaps it and coils it up on the stern deck just behind the cockpit.  The cockpit is a lower area in the back of the boat so you're working the gear at waist height.

Tom has a "just legal" king salmon on the hook!! (King salmon have to be 28 inches long in order to keep them.) You can see the wire hanging down with the little blue collar.  He pulls the leader and gives the fish a smack on the head with the gaff hook to stun it.  Then he turns the gaff hook around and uses the gaff part to lift the fish onto the boat.  

Oh yeah, here it comes!

Look at that ocean - nice and calm - what a nice day for fishing.

And there's the fish safely aboard the boat.  He unhooks it by pulling the leader with the gaff hook in the crook of the hook and back goes the leader and hook into the water.

On the right of the photo are fish he caught earlier that have been "gilled" and bled.

Nice job, Tom!

KING Salmon Commercial Fishing - July Opening

About the third week of July, my friend and past boss called me and asked if I wanted to crew for the July 1 king salmon opening.  As you may know if you follow this blog, I like king salmon.  I'm not passionate about catching them, but they are a beautiful fish - as well as tasty and strong.  After checking with the appropriate personnel, I said "Sure."

Tom cooked us a special "pre-season" dinner - steak on the BBQ on June 30.  Once the season opened the next day, there wouldn't be time for fancy dinners.  He's a good cook and it was great.  We anchored up at Biorka and this photo looks back toward town.  You can't see it from here so don't look too hard.  The other boats are commercial trollers and are anchored up with us.  I always like to see the mountains in the background with the clouds hanging above them.

As a little background, Tom's boat is a 46 foot troller named the "Lady Brijet."  A troller catches fish with multiple leaders hanging off four lines that go as straight as possible down into the water.  You can see the bow pole hanging out in front of the boat.  One line hangs down from that.  Then another line hangs down way out on the "main" pole which you can see amidships.  The reels on the right of the picture pull the lines in and out using hydraulics.  

You can see the poles again in this picture.  The Lady Brijet is a very comfortable boat, with galley, dinette, and captain's chair in the main cabin - and sleeping berths up forward.  There's a big fishhold in the middle of the boat where the gray box looking thing appears.

Wet Walk - Beaver Lake Trail

ML and I are 'training' for our impending (read 2 months to go) Peru trip.  Despite a typical Southeast Alaska rainforest day, we decided we better truck up the Beaver Lake Trail - a 4 mile sojourn that takes us up the mountain a ways too.  What a fun time!

You walk up along a stream.  Today it was full of water from the rain.  At this time of year, the periphery of the woods are VERY green.  After all, there's still a good 15 hours of light and lots of moisture.

At the top of the stream is a big falls.  Today there was a section of it, that you can just barely see in the middle, that went straight out.  Nice.  

A little further you get up to Beaver Lake.  I love the mist and clouds in hanging out, drifting through.  Sometimes the lake was calm enough to have a reflection of the surrounding mountains, and sometimes there was just enough breeze to erase the mirror.

You can see there's still some snow hanging out in the crevasses of the mountains.  

Yeah, you're right.  This is staged!

After you walk up to the lake, there's a trail around it.  You walk through a "mass wasting event" - a multiple tree blowdown that friends of ours barely survived.  Then it opens to an alpine meadow that has some real nice flowers at this time of year. 

The bridge is made of yellow cedar.  ML is laughing because I ran across the bridge thinking I was going to get a picture.  She ran right behind me to foil my attempt. 

But look at who won!

Great trail, great fun.

Fishing rods renewed!

I confess that I'm a practical sports fisherman.  I like to eat salmon, so I try and catch some.  Smoked king salmon is probably my favorite food - assuming that I've done it right.  Or, I should say that smoked king salmon right out of the smoker is definitely my favorite food: warm from the smoker, moist flesh, salty enough but not too salty, and the taste of the KING!

Anyway, any self respecting sports fisherman would be embarrassed to use my fishing rods and gear.  But they catch, so I don't worry about it much.  Finally, though, one rod had only two eyes left and one rod didn't have a tip or a second eye.  It's kind of hard to use fishing rods like that, so it was time to fix them.

And that's where YouTube comes in handy!  So far, I have never failed to find "how-to" videos on the internet somewhere. There are quite a few videos about, as I learned to call them, "rod guides."  I always thought they were little fishing eyes!

Here is the old stuff.  A rod guide is broken in the back of the photo.  In the front is a rod tip.   I can be kind of impatient, so after I followed the video instructions to use a lighter to warm up the rod tip and it didn't come off with a pair of pliers, I used my trusty propane torch.  WOW.  That thing shot right off and would have killed me if I was in front of it.  So much for not following instructions - again.

The rod tip was easy to put on - put a little warmed up hot glue in it and shove it on (of course making sure eyes/guides are all lined up.

Yep, there she is!  I know, doesn't quite look like the fishing rods in the store, huh?  But I'm pretty doggone sure that it will hold up as long as the old ones did.  With a couple tricks to start and finish that you'll have to look up on youtube, you just hold the thread and turn the rod with your other hand.  Slick!  Then you put some epoxy over it.

They've held fine so far after 6 hours of fishing or so.  And I feel good that I kept my two rods out of the landfill and I didn't have to buy new ones!!!!

Just Cruising with my Friends

I was trolling out of the harbor the other day, and saw this.  Tough to go to the bathroom.

ML's Green Thumb

Our Mom loved flowers.  As was the case "back in those days," she had certain flower gardens that were "hers" and our Dad took care of the rest.  She was proud of the gardens and they looked pretty doggone nice.  I remember her working hard in the evening when it cooled off a little and she had Dad to help entertain the little urchins (us!).  I confess that I didn't appreciate them nearly as much as I could or should have at the time, but now that no-one cares except my brother and sister, I think they were glorious.

ML also has a green thumb.  She has a real sense of what plants need to allow them to thrive.  In the last week or so, she planted some pots of flowers.  Take a look.  Pretty amazing.  The photos don't really do them justice.

This is the setting.  There is a short and cool growing season in Southeast Alaska.  But there is lots of light, although not always sunlight.  Containers, or pots, are often the best way to go and ML just sets them on the porch.

I won't ruin the beauty with commentary.  Please continue below.

Time is going fast, but there's still lots of Southeast Summer.  And the flowers will just get better.